Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid

Like many people, I saw the article in Wired this week. I've been using OKC for a while, and thought it was pretty interesting. I actually spent a few hours analyzing the article, trying to figure out how I could apply it to my own profile. (It did help a bit.) Then I saw this book. Not all of us are going to write Python scripts to build our profiles or anything like that, but this book is the perfect distillation what he did. In other words—exactly what I needed to apply the info to the profile, nothing more, nothing less. Worth the $5 if you're an analytical, logical person.

The book is rather short and presents and interesting strategy, at least for men, which is what I'll focus on for this review. Basically, his strategy was to match yourself with as many women as possible. I found this to be counterintuitive because I thought the goal of OKCupid's system was to be able to discern which partners "in the crowd" would be right for you. However, if you accept the fact that OKCupid's system doesn't really work perfectly (it doesn't), then the author's strategy makes sense. The best way to find women is to be able to match with many of them, message a bunch that you like, and then reap the small percentage of those that actually respond. Most strategies I have seen before had the "message a bunch of them" part already figured out, but the new idea the author brings along is that matching them better might make them more likely to respond. Strategies to increase match score is to rate all questions where you agree with popular opinion "Mandatory" and to rate your more controversial answers "Not Important" or to not answer them at all. For women it was the opposite, be as discerning as possible. Answer all your controversial answers "Mandatory" and your popular opinions "Not Important". This would allow you to sort through the deluge of suitors as efficiently as possible. The author probably had a mathematical reason behind this, because you get the most "information" about yourself from what you disagree with most people about, which I thought was fun to think about. My only complaint would be that the book was too short. I would have loved to see a full, researched study on OKCupid matching. Oh well, I can wait for Dataclysm, which will hopefully live up to the hype.

Let's start with the good: 1. Responder Strategy: this is a strategy of reducing the number of messages and prospective matches so that you get more of the wheat and less of the chaff. This would basically involve avoiding non-divisive questions (basically avoid answering questions that most prospective matches near you would answer the same way), mark few answers as being acceptable for each match question as much as possible, and set questions with one acceptable answer as "mandatory" (lol), two acceptable answers as "very important", and 3+ acceptable answers as somewhat important. 2. Simulated Annealing Procedure: a step-by-step procedure of answering okcupid questions based on your strategy. In summary: A. delete all your match questions; B. answer new match questions based on one of the strategies (preferably the responder one and my advise is to answer only questions you deem very important at first, then for each very important match question, answer 25 somewhat important questions); C. browse for your matches, organized by match percentage; D. click on one of the top matches and answer their questions; E. Rinse and repeat... 3. Hooks: basically, write down anything about yourself that would attract your desirable matches enough to message you and be as specific about them as possible. These would include hobbies, career, jokes, etc. 4. Additional tips on sending messages, how to conduct yourself on a date, etc. Now for for the bad: 1. Searcher Strategy: the very opposite of Responder Strategy and what basically Mckinlay used in his search (SPOILER ALERT: his fiancee found him through a keyword search for tall men with blue eyes near her.). The problem with this strategy is that it generates more chaff than wheat, thus wasting the time and, potentially, money trying to narrow down your prospective matches. Unless the idea of a success rate of 4.5% sounds appealing to you, you might want to avoid this strategy. 2. Outdated information: the internet does age quickly doesn't it? Unless you've been living in space with Major Tom, all of us know that the Importance Scale has changed from a five to four point scale. Also, according to an email I've received from Okcupid staff, mandatory wasn't deleted, but renamed to "very important". Thus, the old "very important" (a question of a weight of 50) has actually been deleted. But it's a minor flaw. 3. Length: waaaay too short. Why couldn't he just write a blog series about his guide to optimizing cupid so that we don't have to spend any mon... nevermind. Overall, it's not that bad. Is it worth buying though? I think I got some worth from it, but so far many have written about Mckinlay's strategy and procedure. Thus, you probably already have an idea of how to implement it without actually buying the book. :-P

Great book! I just read it all in one go despite having tons of stuff to do before tomorrow. Of course I'm really happy to have found my partner, but it would have been so satisfying to have this info back when I was on OKC. I feel silly that I didn't bother figuring this out on my own. A++

The other goes over some tricks you can use to create an online profile that attracts women, but this is such a waste. The biggest point this bok makes is that you can use OkCupid to search for the common things women like and then circle back to your profile and make it match. You can also look at 5 STAR rated profiles to see what other successful male profiles have in them. OkCupid's ability to do statistics is greater than any dating site out these, so this book has value. The biggest problem with this book is that the author doesn't seem to know exactly why he is so good. He has little snippets here and there, but the complete lack of detail on how he search's exactly what lines he uses on messaging and txting, etc.... Whether he was getting laid by 10's or going out with the ugliest women on earth. This is a 60 page booklet and is not worth $8, but I am glad I read it, gave me more to chew on, which is what I wanted.

After hearing of MiKinlay's story from Wired, I thought it would be fun to do some reading about the method he used in finding his perfect match. This short paper does a great job of summarizing the analysis he did and how he used that data to build a dating profile that appealed to the women he wanted to meet. If your looking for the code he used, or his exact algorithms your out of luck. There's none of that here. Which is a good thing because if EVERYBODY started doing exactly what he did then it would be useless. However he does give a step by step process on how to optimize your match percentage and give tips on how to find the questions you SHOULD be answering instead of the random stream OKC gives you. I know some of the comments over on Wired were saying how that article was just an ad for this book/paper. Honestly I don't care, this is a fun little look at the data behind online matchmaking. McKinlay just used that data to make his match percentage higher with the type of people he wanted to meet, which is really what online dating is all about. I for one would be interested to know what other insights you could glean from the data he (and OKC) have collected. Big data is here to stay and this just gives some practical advice to use on OKC.

This is a concise and clearly written summary of McKinlay's method. It contains no code, but OkC has no public API so any inclusions would be out-of-date and useless in a few months anyways. What it does contain is a masterful approach to dating that anyone with time and discipline can implement on their own.

I bought this because I read an article about it somewhere and was interested in the user clusters he found. I was curious about which traits were correlated, and how strongly. I was wondering if he applied the same data analysis to men. Instead, what I got was an extremely short (60 page) "Basics of OKC". I wouldn't have been so disappointed, except I was expecting something more about data analysis, and psychology, and other interesting musings, but instead got treated to typical basic online dating advice (don't "mansplain", have hooks in your profile, etc).

It is straight to the point with exact tops on how to achieve a wanted result. Som of the extracts from authors own experience I found were not necessary to mention, but that was only roundabout 5-10 pages of material, so no biggie. All in all - I recommend reading for anyone who is interested in matching algorithms

Don’t waste your money. Cupid now works quite differently. The recommendations are inapplicable and useless. The book is entertaining but won’t be of any help.

Das Buch bietet einige interessante Ansätze, um das Match-System von OkCupid besser zu verstehen und gezielt zu nutzen. Besonders für analytisch denkende Menschen ist der wissenschaftliche Ansatz des Autors spannend und nützlich. Die Strategien, wie man durch cleveres Beantworten der Fragen die Match-Rate erhöhen kann, sind gut erklärt und praktisch umsetzbar. Allerdings ist ein Großteil der Informationen inzwischen veraltet, da OkCupid einige Funktionen geändert hat. Manche Tipps lassen sich daher nicht mehr 1:1 anwenden, was den Nutzen des Buches für aktuelle Nutzer einschränkt. Zudem hätte ich mir mehr Tiefe und ausführlichere Erklärungen gewünscht. Für jemanden, der sich intensiv mit Online-Dating-Algorithmen beschäftigen möchte, ist es trotzdem einen Blick wert – aber eben mit Einschränkungen. Fazit: Gute Ansätze, aber die Aktualität lässt zu wünschen übrig.